Modern accounts of Bengal's agrarian history often offer illuminating discussions of debt, land tenure, and peasant mobilization but frequently treat the transition from pre-colonial to colonial Bengal as a largely continuous process.Many such narratives correctly highlight how peasant grievances eventually found political expression through agrarian reform movements, tenant activism, and the rise of leaders such as A. K. Fazlul Huq.
Yet a recurring problem in interpretations of Bengal's agrarian history is the tendency to understate the magnitude of the colonial transformation that began with the Permanent Settlement of 1793.By emphasizing continuity between pre-colonial land relations and twentieth-century peasant grievances, some interpretations inadvertently obscure the profound structural rupture created by British colonial policy.
The result is not merely a matter of historical imprecision. It affects how readers understand the origins of peasant indebtedness, the social foundations of Fazlul Huq's political appeal, and the very nature of the agrarian crisis that shaped late colonial Bengal.
The Problem of Historical Continuity
A common weakness in discussions of Bengal's agrarian evolution lies in the tendency to merge two distinct historical realities: the Mughal agrarian order and the colonial land regime that replaced it.
Some interpretations of Mughal agrarian relations emphasize the existence of overlapping claims among the peasant, the zamindar, and the state, while also suggesting that cultivators enjoyed hereditary rights of possession that were recognized and protected by imperial authority.
This interpretation derives largely from the work of Irfan Habib, whose scholarship describes a highly organized Mughal fiscal system designed to secure revenue by preserving the productive relationship between cultivators and the land. Yet Habib himself carefully distinguished between hereditary occupancy rights and modern notions of absolute ownership. Mughal agrarian relations remained layered, negotiated, and characterized by overlapping claims rather than exclusive proprietary titles. Any attempt to translate these arrangements into the language of modern property rights risks oversimplifying a historically contested terrain.
The problem becomes particularly acute in the Bengal context. Historians have long noted that Mughal administrative penetration in Bengal remained uneven and that only a small fraction of villages (~1.5%) were directly measured for revenue purposes during much of the Mughal period.This raises an important historical question: to what extent could a distant imperial bureaucracy systematically enforce or protect individual peasant rights in a vast deltaic frontier where local powerholders frequently exercised considerable autonomy?
The distinction between the tightly administered Mughal heartland and the more decentralized agrarian reality of Bengal is therefore essential. Failing to recognize these regional differences risks importing institutional assumptions from the imperial core into a frontier society that often operated according to different political and fiscal dynamics.
The Structural Rupture of 1793
The deeper historiographical problem is temporal. Many interpretations of Bengal's agrarian history implicitly assume that the customary rights and agrarian relationships of the Mughal era survived largely intact into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such an assumption tends to obscure the profound structural rupture created by the Permanent Settlement of 1793.
Under the Mughal system, the zamindar functioned primarily as an intermediary responsible for revenue collection and local administration. Whatever privileges and influence zamindars exercised, they were not universally regarded as unrestricted private proprietors of land in the modern legal sense. Cultivators retained customary and hereditary claims that formed an essential component of the agrarian order.
The Permanent Settlement altered these relationships dramatically. Seeking a predictable source of revenue and a politically loyal landed elite, the East India Company vested zamindars with legally enforceable proprietary rights and transformed land into a commodity capable of transfer, auction, mortgage, and speculation on an unprecedented scale.
This change represented far more than an administrative adjustment. It introduced a fundamentally new conception of property rooted in British legal and commercial principles. In effect, the colonial state replaced a layered agrarian structure with a system that privileged landlord interests above those of cultivators.
The agrarian crisis confronting Bengal's peasants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was therefore not simply a continuation of earlier Mughal arrangements. It was the cumulative product of more than a century of colonial economic and legal restructuring.
The Absentee Babu and the Communalization of Class
The structural rupture created by the Permanent Settlement also transformed the demography of land ownership in Bengal and profoundly altered the social foundations of rural politics.
The Permanent Settlement enabled wealthy, urbanized Hindu elites, often identified with the "Babu" class of Calcutta and western Bengal, to acquire extensive zamindari estates across eastern Bengal. Many of these absentee landlords lived far from the countryside from which they derived their income and often remained detached from the daily realities of agricultural life while extracting rents from a predominantly Muslim peasantry.
This observation should not be interpreted through a simplistic communal lens. The essential issue was economic power rather than religious identity. Nevertheless, because patterns of class and community often overlapped in Bengal, agrarian grievances increasingly acquired a communal dimension in popular political discourse.
This geographical, class, and increasingly communal divide helped transform rural indebtedness into what became the quiet architecture of everyday life in Bengal. The growth of absentee landlordism, combined with the expansion of money-lending networks and layers of agrarian intermediaries, made indebtedness a structural feature of the colonial countryside. Understanding these developments requires examining not merely communal identities but the broader political economy created by the Permanent Settlement and subsequent colonial land policies.
The political significance of Fazlul Huq's movement can only be fully understood against this background. His appeal rested not simply on promises of debt relief but on his ability to give political expression to a broad sense of agrarian injustice rooted in generations of rural inequality, indebtedness, and unequal access to land. His challenge was directed not merely at individual landlords but at a colonial agrarian order that had shaped Bengal's countryside for nearly a century and a half.
Fazlul Huq and the Institutionalization of Agrarian Reform
By the 1920s and 1930s, Bengal's agrarian crisis had reached a stage where legislative intervention became unavoidable. It was in this context that A. K. Fazlul Huq emerged as one of the most important advocates of peasant interests and agrarian reform.
Huq recognized the severe limits of mere tenancy reform.While the Bengal Tenancy Amendment Act of 1928 strengthened occupancy rights for some categories of tenants, it did little to address the deeper problem of rural indebtedness and the predatory credit market that trapped millions of cultivators.
The Bengal Agricultural Debtors Act of 1935 became one of the most important legislative instruments available to agrarian reformers. After assuming office in 1937, Huq used the legislation as a practical mechanism for reducing peasant indebtedness and challenging entrenched creditor power. Debt Settlement Boards significantly reduced the burden of rural debt in many districts (from Rs 367 lakh to Rs 179 lakh by late 1938), providing tangible relief to thousands of indebted cultivators and demonstrating the practical impact of agrarian reform policies.
Equally important was the political strategy of the Krishak Praja Party.The KPP functioned as an agricultural coalition that brought together wealthy jotedars, indebted smallholders, tenant farmers, and landless laborers around a common program of rural reform.
Why the Permanent Settlement Matters
Any attempt to understand twentieth-century peasant politics must begin with the structural transformation produced by the Permanent Settlement of 1793. The agrarian world inherited by Fazlul Huq was not simply an extension of the Mughal system. It was the result of more than a century of colonial restructuring of land rights, revenue administration, and rural power.
The significance of the Permanent Settlement extends beyond legal changes in ownership. It reshaped class relations throughout Bengal by strengthening landlord interests, facilitating absentee landlordism, encouraging sub-infeudation, and creating new opportunities for commercial capital to acquire landed property. The jotedar class that later became a major force in Bengal's rural politics emerged largely within this transformed environment.
Agrarian politics therefore cannot be separated from political economy. Rural indebtedness, tenancy disputes, peasant mobilization, and the eventual anti-zamindari movement were all deeply connected to the colonial land regime established after 1793.
To understand the politics of Fazlul Huq without understanding the Permanent Settlement is to examine the consequences while overlooking one of the principal causes.
Conclusion
The history of Bengal's agrarian transformation reveals how localized peasant grievances gradually evolved into organized political movements capable of influencing legislation, governance, and ultimately the structure of landownership itself.Yet many interpretations of Bengal's rural history continue to underestimate the scale of the transformation unleashed by colonial land policies.
The Permanent Settlement of 1793 constituted a fundamental rupture in Bengal's agrarian history, separating the layered and negotiated land relations of the pre-colonial era from the proprietary landlordism of colonial rule.
A more historically grounded interpretation would acknowledge that the agrarian world inherited by Fazlul Huq was not a surviving remnant of the Mughal order but a fundamentally new colonial construct. Recognizing this distinction is essential not only for understanding Bengal's agrarian history but also for appreciating the full significance of Huq's challenge to the colonial political economy that shaped it.
Read the first part: Land, Revenue, and Authority: The Making of Bengal’s Zamindari System, HERE!
Dr. Habib Siddiqui is a scholar, human-rights activist, and freelance writer who has authored several books and numerous articles focusing on politics, history, and human rights. His notable works include: Bangladesh: A Polarized and Divided Nation? (2021) and ‘Modi-fied’ India: The Transformation of a Nation, a meticulously researched study published by Peter Lang International Academic Publishers examining the shifting landscape of democracy and human rights in the region (2026).
